By 2024, Nvidia had become one of the world’s most valuable companies

Nvidia was founded in a Denny's restaurant

Nvidia is one of a handful of companies valued at more than $1T. In its early days, the semiconductor company sold GPUs, or graphics processing units, that were used for video games. But in recent years, Nvidia’s chips have been used for crypto and AI. Nvidia has faced several setbacks on its journey, including when the US sanctioned chip exports to China.

Nvidia entered its AI era after learning that its chips could be used in industries beyond gaming

Its semiconductor chips were used in the automotive industry, for data centers, and by crypto miners. And starting in 2006, Nvidia took steps that would ultimately transform it into the AI company it’s known as today. This podcast is the second part of a three-part series diving deep into Nvidia’s company evolution.

Nvidia pioneered the GPU industry via its origins as a video game company

From the mid-1990s to early 2000s, Nvidia carved out a niche as a maker of semiconductor chips specially designed for the video game industry. Nvidia broke through the competition to seal deals with TSMC and Microsoft, and popularized the term “graphics processing unit,” aka GPU.

Nvidia's attempted Arm acquisition revealed its hopes of becoming the world's leading AI company

Though Nvidia's acquisition of Arm, another company that designs semiconductors, was ultimately quashed over antitrust concerns, the attempt offered insights into Nvidia's business strategy. Over time, Nvidia has increasingly focused on using its graphics cards to power machine learning, and its platform CUDA is dominant in the sector.

Over half of Nvidia’s revenue comes from outside the US

This chart breaks down where Nvidia’s revenue comes from—both in terms of which business segments it’s generated by and in which countries. Most of Nvidia’s revenue stems from its computing segment, which includes billions spent by companies building AI.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang once saved Nvidia from bankruptcy with a multi-million dollar Hail Mary

Nvidia is now known as one of the top companies contributing to the AI boom, but back in the 1990s, it almost failed. One last-ditch effort conversation that CEO Jensen Huang had with an investor saved the company.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s keynotes have become a main event at CES

Watch Jensen Huang’s 2025 CES keynote, where he unveiled major advances in AI and GPU technology. His presentations now draw global attention, blending product reveals with sweeping visions of the future of computing.

Nvidia's rapid development of GPUs is forcing computing to depart from something called Moore's law

Moore’s law, named after Intel’s cofounder, predicts that the number of transistors on a chip will double every two years. But Nvidia could be outpacing that prediction.

CUDA was Nvidia’s first step into artificial intelligence

CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) is a parallel computing platform that was developed by Nvidia in the mid-2000s. By letting people perform computations in parallel, rather than sequentially, CUDA allowed people to compute large amounts of data quickly. CUDA has been used to build machine-learning models as well.

Nvidia controls more than four-fifths of the GPU market—but isn't considered a monopoly

Semiconductor company Nvidia has a commanding market share when it comes to graphics processing units. Its competitors include Advanced Micro Devices and Intel, which together account for less than a fifth of the GPU market.

Nvidia’s RTX graphics chips support ray tracing, which, the company says, can boost performance in games by 25%

Ray tracing allows developers to add more realistic-looking lighting and shadows to video games, and Nvidia continues to improve the tech in newer chips. Rendering light realistically in video games requires immense computing power, and ray tracing “cheats” the process with a little guesswork.

Many of the top companies in the US by market cap began as tech startups

Combined, the top seven companies by market cap in the US as of December 2024—Apple, Nvidia, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Tesla—were worth more than $16T at the time.

The major AI industry players are creating a web of circular investments

Bloomberg created a network diagram that shows how companies like Nvidia and OpenAI are fueling the AI money machine. The chart shows that many top AI companies provide significant investments to one another.

NVIDIA named several computer chip architectures after Grace Hopper

Unveiled in 2023, the GH200 Grace Hopper Superchip, designed for generative AI applications in data center-scale systems, combines a Grace CPU with a Hopper GPU to create a coherent memory model. This allows the Hopper to access Grace data directly, reducing the need to repeatedly copy data back and forth and vastly improving performance.

DeepSeek is a Chinese AI startup that rattled US competitors when it made an AI model much faster and cheaper than they did

DeepSeek unveiled an AI model in 2025 that it said was made in two months for roughly $6M. For context, OpenAI has suggested it took over $100M to make its AI model GPT-4. The news rattled the stocks of American tech companies, including leading chipmaker Nvidia.

Nvidia Omniverse can be used to accelerate 3D workflows and explore creative ideas

This video explores different apps available within Nvidia Omniverse that artists can use to create cinematic, virtual worlds. Some of the tools are AI-powered, like a feature that converts spoken audio into a video of a character speaking.

AI data center growth has created shortages and price hikes in computer parts

The parallel processing needed to power large language models for AI chatbots and other tools drove demand for high-speed graphics processing units to spike in 2025, enabling capital-rich technology companies to price out consumers. Similar demands for the computer memory used in storage drives are expected to keep shortages from easing through 2028.

Rival companies AMD and Nvidia's CEOs are related

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and Nvidia are two of the world's largest manufacturers of processing chips and are fierce competitors. AMD's CEO Lisa Su and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang are actually first cousins once removed, but reportedly don't share a close relationship and didn't even meet until later in life at an industry event.

Explore a timeline of Tesla through 2025

Initially called Tesla Motors, the company was renamed Tesla Inc. in February 2017. Its Model Y became the world's bestselling EV worldwide by the end of 2023, overtaking the Model 3's title from 2020.

See the world's top 20 billionaires in 2026

This data visualization shows the 20 wealthiest people in the world as of January 2026. Topping the list with a net worth of more than $713B is Elon Musk, trailed by Larry Page ($258B), Jeff Bezos ($251B), and Larry Ellison ($243B).

Understanding TikTok-owner ByteDance's business model

ByteDance has ridden TikTok's major success to become the world's most valuable startup. This deep dive showcases some of the company's smartest moves and tactics, and where it's headed next.

The Nasdaq's 'Magnificent 7' companies are responsible for roughly 40% of the Nasdaq 100 index's gains, while the remaining 93 companies account for the other 60%.

Electrical grids worldwide must double their power delivery capacity by 2050 to meet surging demand from AI and electric vehicles.

Before Silicon Valley became the largest tech hub in the world, it was an agricultural area known for its flowers and fruit

It was called the “Valley of Heart’s Delight.” This video by Vox explains how the area went from growing prunes to producing computer chips. It also explains how Stanford University had a big impact on the area’s development.

A timeline of computer history

The earliest computers bear little resemblance to the computing devices that most people rely on today. This timeline graphic from the Computer History Museum tracks their evolution, from the early days of bulky mainframes that only experts generally used through to the personal computing revolution and on to the modern mobile era. Readers will learn important context ahead of the next major computing platform shift.

The name 'Silicon Valley' arose from the founding of Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Fairchild Semiconductor in 1956-57, founded near Stanford University in Palo Alto

A deep dive on everything you need to know about virtual reality

In the wake of Facebook’s purchase of Oculus VR, can the revolutionary technology triumph anew? These interactive articles chart the rise and fall — and rise again — of VR.

Google began as a Stanford University dorm room project

Launched in 1998, Google revolutionized search engines with its clean design and PageRank algorithm. As of 2025, Google has about 90% of the search market share but faces new challenges from AI-powered competitors and regulatory scrutiny.

In 2025, four executives from large tech companies were given positions in the US Army Reserves—including Palantir Chief Technology Officer Shyam Sankar, which reinforced Palantir's ties with the US military and its role as a leading defense partner.

A vending machine run with Anthropic's AI went out of business after it was convinced to give away items for free and sell a video game console.

In 2019, a laptop loaded with six of the worst malware in history and described as 'an exhibit of historical weaponry' sold for $1.3M.

SpaceX's S-1 or 'prospectus' revealed many previously unknown details about the company, including its unprofitability despite doing $18.7B in revenue in 2025, exactly how many voting shares Elon Musk will have in the company (roughly 85%), and more.

As of 2025, the most cited papers in science include a review of graphene, methods to improve image recognition, streamlining electron density calculations, and optimizing protein studies.

Watch this video that uses Lego bricks to explain how venture capital works.

The 1987 Nintendo video game 'Stadium Events' isn't known for being particularly fun, but its scarcity has made it a highly sought-after item that has sold for up to $35K at auction.

Netflix profits when you're not watching, and its movies are designed that way—read a detail-rich critical essay exposing lesser-known Netflix takes

English mathematician Ada Lovelace wrote the first computer algorithm a century before computers existed and hypothesized that computing devices would one day be able to compose music—foreseeing the generative AI systems of today.

Roughly 43 million US borrowers owe roughly $1.7T in student debt, the second-largest source of consumer debt behind mortgages.

Memecoins are a type of cryptocurrency—a form of digital currency with a wide variety of uses—created around popular 'memes,' or viral internet jokes.

Warren Buffett's former professor Benjamin Graham is known as the 'father of value investing,' a strategy in which investors seek to buy stocks trading below their intrinsic worth.

Fast-casual restaurant Chili's is experiencing a resurgence, with its parent company recently reporting a nearly 32% increase in sales, thanks to passionate Gen Z fans on TikTok.

In 2026, Finland was named the world's happiest country for the ninth consecutive year based on its wealth, social safety network, and high life expectancy, among other factors.

After 25 people used virtual reality headsets to practice flying with virtual wings—flapping their arms—their visual cortex responded to the wings almost as if they were real arms, treating them as body parts.

Massive 3D printers have been used to build homes by stacking layers of 'concrete toothpaste,' a fire-resistant material that effectively insulates against outside noise.

Sony set the standard for cylinder-shaped batteries when it repurposed manufacturing equipment used to make rolls of magnetic recording tape.

According to the physics of black holes, our 4D reality may be a hologram—a projection of information coded on a 2D surface on the edge of the universe.

How fusion—which releases energy when two lighter atoms combine to form a heavier atom—differs from fission

Watch how deep-sea mining equipment collects and processes polymetallic nodules—metal-rich, potato-shaped rocks—from the ocean floor and creates environmentally damaging plumes of sediments.

For centuries, Niagara Falls has been a magnet for daredevils seeking to conquer one of nature's most powerful wonders, with its 200-foot drop and water rushing at 32 feet per second with 280 tons of force.

In 1945, Surrealist artist Salvador Dalí and legendary animator Walt Disney began collaborating on a short film that was not completed until 2003, years after both men had died.